


The Noise of This Place

by ChildofStorms



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood and Injury, Childhood Trauma, Desert Keith Week 2018, Injury, Loss, Loss of Identity, Loss of Parent(s), Psychological Trauma, Survival, Trauma, desert survival, why deserts and trauma don't mix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-01 18:31:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15149276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChildofStorms/pseuds/ChildofStorms
Summary: The desert was already a difficult place to live, but it was even worse when your entire world had been shaken to its core. For Desert Keith Week 2018





	1. Provisions

**Author's Note:**

> This entire collection is with Mumford and Son's album, "Wilder Mind". I hope you guys all enjoy it!

Day 1: Provisions

So, fuck your dreams  
And don’t you pick at our seams  
I’ll turn into a monster for you, if you pay me enough  
None of this counts, if you do, cloud up.  
(Monster- Mumford and Sons)

He once thought that the desert symbolized a new life. It was scorched and baptized like fire, like the side of the shack that had once been closest to his home, and some months it was more likely to reduce your body to nothing but singed nerves and dizzy spells, but even with its moments of fire, he could see more.

He saw it in the palo verde, somehow still managing to stay green despite the patches of brown that would emerge during the hotter seasons. Or how the wildflowers would shine yellow gold when the sun bled across them in the morning. Even the wildlife, brief moments where you could see the tails of darting lizards or the shadows of the grey hawks and turkey vultures that could be followed with a keen eye reminded him that there was more here.

He wondered if it was only him that the desert did not give new life to. It had been a small thought, when his father would always pretend that he didn’t know more about his mother. IT was a vivid memory, the sunsets they’d spend watching roadrunners darting onto rocks to better hunt their prey before taking off once more. They’d count them, see who spotted them first. Sometimes, monitor lizards would appear too, but Keith had never liked how they’d chase away the other animals.

His father hadn’t answered first, didn’t even look to him in acknowledgement, and even as a twelve year old boy he knew that it was something that should not have been asked. He was a twelve year old boy, though, and knowing there was something more created the greatest chasm within him than anything else had at the time. He knew other boys had mothers, he knew other boys thought it was gross when their dads kissed their moms in front of them, and it only made Keith wonder why he never saw the same thing. 

The question hadn’t fully formed then, but the feeling of missing something was a blemished and pocked foundation stone that only grew and became more cemented within himself.

The question grew, as he continued school, it grew one night as he woke to searing smoke and desperate eyes form his father. 

It grew when he woke up alone in a hospital room that felt less alive than the desert that was his home, it grew even more when he realized his father was not resting in another room.

It began to form words and a consciousness of its own when he was enclosed at the first foster home, only two months from the orphanage and back near the desert his house used to stand in. It had been the middle of dry season, so hot that not even the air conditioning of the house would syphon the heat away. 

But, he forgot it when he’d met Shiro, when he’d walked into the Garrison and realized life was not just in the desert, and that maybe it would be more willing to embrace him here than before.

He’d been wrong.

\--

Sometimes, he wondered if the desert had no life to spare him. 

Sometimes, he wondered if the mesas and the katsina were watching and deemed him unfit. 

Sometimes, he wondered if they barred him from anything that could give him sustenance in this desert, if they thought he didn’t deserve it.

Didn’t deserve it like he didn’t deserve his mother or dad. Or Shiro.

When he first opened the shack doors, he turned the picture of his father over. He then walked to the narrow closet that fit in between the bathroom door and the slight hallway alcove that led to a kitchen. He let cleaning fill his mind, he let it take him away from the fact that the fridge was empty and that a bundle of severance money rested in his jacket pocket. 

He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t feel desperate or needy. He really didn’t feel anything at that time, only the push and pull of a broom that was ready to snap in half from age.

\--

It took three days before he addressed thirst, silently thankful that the water pipes still worked, though he didn’t want to think about how they were more than likely not a clean source. He pushed the dizziness away, though. The fatigue that built and encompassed him as he stood was less than knowing that he had found life only to lose it again.

The money still weighed in his pocket, almost taunting him.

It was the next night, barely being able to fall asleep with the migraine that washed over him, that he thought he woke up to the scent of charred meat. He hadn’t been able to open his eyes, but he felt something there next to him.

He thought it had been real at the time, his mind dazed and his muscles locked. He thought he heard his father whisper near him, close as if he was kneeling next to the couch and the only thing Keith had to do was open his eyes and he’d see his father again.

He wanted to, the pull almost unfreezing him, before he realized the smell came from where the other stood.

He didn’t fully wake up until he could feel the sun across his face, until he could no longer smell what remained of his father.

It took more than once, to leave the shack with the jacket and money in hand with the faintest idea of the nearest store. His bike was almost too fast for him as it rushed over dried riverbeds and between the circles of creosote and wilting snakeweed, and he wondered if the desert would use his life for other things if he fell.

The smell of the burnt remains that still lingered told him no, though. The desert didn’t care for his life, just like it hadn’t for his father. 

He didn’t want to let it take it from him, not anymore.


	2. Wildlife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please feel free to comment, I love hearing from you all!

Day 2: Wildlife

I look at you all torn up  
I left you waiting to bleed  
I guess the truth works two ways  
Maybe the truth’s not what we need  
(Cold Arms- Mumford & Sons)

“Remember Keith, it’s the eye contact that turns ‘em feral. Like when you got sent to the office when the teacher thought you were glaring.”

Eye contact hadn’t been the only reason, he knew. His father knew that, too. The voice of the classroom, the breathing of it and the tempo was just never the same pattern as his own. Keith tried, he really did, to find the pattern and adopt it. It was almost tamed before the fire, before every pattern he had come to know and identify was rewritten and then translated into a script that Keith had never even seen before.

He wondered if his dad could have fit it in to what could be understood, if he was still there.

Maybe, he wouldn’t have been able to pull Keith out from all the misunderstanding and the grey space that now separated him from what others grasped so easily. 

It took more than a month of knowing Shiro to realize that the code could be broken and that he could find a way to navigate it all. He’d seen it firsthand when Shiro clarified misunderstandings and complications that never seemed to cease. He wondered if it made him useless, knowing that it took someone else to walk before him and clear the brambles and the dangers away so that Keith no longer had to fall each time a mistake was made.

He tried to learn it, in case Shiro would no longer be there to find the way. He tried with classmates, only to clumsily cross over the gaps between them with no show of finesse. He was sure it only made it worse, those attempts, but he was too worried to ask. He tried with professors. Sometimes he was sure Montgomery understood, that there was a spark that was sounded across Morse code to prove that she recognized the attempt and appreciated it. Other days though, he was sure he was the one in the classroom that she wished were not there.

It was easy, he realized, to leave it all when his only connection was lost. It was so simple to measure the worth of being at the Garrison versus the consequences and the memories that filled each hallway and each damn tile that Shiro had stepped on.

Separating was always so messy, and Keith made sure that this one was exceptionally so. He made sure that Montgomery would never see him as the potential-filled student she had said he was. He made sure Iverson didn’t see him as the boy Shiro vouched for.

He burned them all, and he burned himself until any presence he had would not be found again. 

He couldn’t afford to burn the shack like he did with the Garrison, and as the months grew he realized burning himself while in solitary was just as dangerous. He knew the moment the desert saw it, saw his willingness to become withered and made of ash, that it would make it so.

He knew it, one day as he began to step out of the shack and move through the expanse around him, that the desert didn’t just burn. It consumed. It would meet you with the black and red scales and a jaw that refused to release you. It met you with the rattling and the hissing of nearby danger. It came in unexpected moments of adrenaline, knowing that you were within the jaws of something that had no care that you had sentience and dreams, that you didn’t want to die.

He knew it, when yellowed eyes and chiseled fangs greeted him after rounding the riverbed carved sandstone a few miles from the shack. Keith was taller, but he knew the mass of the cougar could pin him down before any form of defense was attempted. 

The heart wrenched jabbing in his chest reminder him to brief, though it was only achieved with shallow and dizzying breaths. It looked so calm, staring at him, but he had thought things calm before. When he heard of the Kerberos mission failing, when he had addressed Iverson personally, he looked calm too in the moment. His muscles were relaxed, leaning against the back of his chair, and Keith saw the pattern that suggested he could engage. He expected that Iverson would respond in the same.

Iverson looked ready to consume him, barely a minute in. This cougar looked the same, the same pattern of relaxed and lazy, yet ready to spring. 

His father use to sit him down during the night, letting him go only briefly so he could reach for the text book that rested on the bookshelf. He pointed out the poisonous things that lived around them, he told him how Apache greenbacks would kill you before you reached help. He told him how turkey vultures’ body temperatures were so high that it killed viruses and any sickness they picked up. 

He told him how a cougar would pin prey down, how it would clamp down onto the throat to stop breathing. How it waited until you drowned in your blood. Keith was lucky Iverson hadn’t gone for his throat.

He was lucky the cougar at least followed that pattern. It watched, uninterested as Keith stayed frozen, and the only thing that crossed his mind was wondering if that was how Shiro and the Holts had died. Breathless and choking on the vacuum around them. 

It took him so long to move after the cougar left, his mind trapped in the patterns made and broken and he wondered if he’d ever find a way to decode them now.


	3. Climate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and leaving kudos! It'm always so happy seeing people reading my stuff!

Day 3: Climate

And the stakes remain too high  
For this silent mind  
And the shake, the lonely itch  
That courses down my spine  
(Snake Eyes- Mumford & Sons)

There were times where Keith simply didn’t think, only following the flow of what was around him until he found himself somewhere new.

He did it during training, filling his body with adrenaline and thrill and for that brief amount of time he felt as if everything perfectly aligned. His thoughts would be silenced. He craved those moments, how they cradled him from what he eventual could not avoid.

Before the Garrison, he would hike to feel this. Sometimes with his father, sometimes alone as long as he promised to stay within sight of the house. He didn’t have the training facilities like before, but as he readied himself that morning he knew that at the least the desert could give him this. 

It was with the sun overhead and the constant feeling of tightening and sensitive skin of sun-scorched shoulders that he realized that he could no longer see clearly. Like a sudden burst of encore, the rest of his body complained in unison. The migraine and lack of sweat was concerning, but he could power through it. It was only a barrier, a way for the desert to keep him where he was, and he had felt worse.

The dizziness, though, the feeling of the shrubs and cacti and grained sand rushing to meet him wasn’t. He tried once, to rise again and try to spot the shack. A second time resulted in failure, too. He laid there, feeling the sun-scorch moving from the shoulders to his chest and arms, to the parts of his legs that his shorts didn’t protect.

Like hearing a crowd through walls, he felt the warnings blaring in his head. Reminding him of heatstroke, reminding him it’d only get worse.

He closed his eyes.

\--

Keith tried to stay together, the week after the Kerberos failure was announced, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

It was embedded in the walls around him, in the teachers and students, too. Their eyes were the worst, but sometimes he thought their body language carried a worse bite. How they’d angle themselves to him, like simply giving him the focus would keep his pieces together. He didn’t know how to tell them that the mere sound of their voices and well wishes were what kept the fracturing alive and well. 

It was near the end of that week, Keith remembered wondering if Shiro would be proud of him lasting this long, or be ashamed that Keith obviously cared so little to still be able to function. Garrison protocol allowed him up to four days of absence before correction, and he’d absorbed it like the lifeline that it was. It was only four days, though. Classes didn’t just stop and wait for when a student fell behind, especially when there was already doubt of him still being suitable for them.

It would have been better. 

“Just remember, son. When you push yourself into dangerous situations, the desert has a way of pushing you back. It won’t play fair. If you aren’t prepared, that’s on you.”

\--

The first voice was high and reedy, low enough pitched that if it wasn’t for the pitch of it, Keith would not have made out the words.

“I still bet that the reason Shirogane failed was because he was so focused on Kogane.”

Another voice, louder and more abrupt, “Dude, that’s not cool. Accidents happen.”

“Yeah, and so does favoritism. Wonder if Kogane blames himself for it.” The response was quick, so sudden that it kept Keith from realizing that he had already opened the door. That they could see him.

There were about five of them, first or second years due to the marks on the uniforms. He didn’t recognize most of them, but the wide blue eyes of the boy sitting next to his burly companion were. They all flinched as he stood there, and he wondered if he looked angry. 

He didn’t know if he was, he wasn’t even sure he was really in the moment with how distant it felt. Even as the blue-eyed one, Lance or Hunk, he couldn’t remember, elbowed the other, hissing out a demand that he apologized, Keith didn’t react.

He didn’t feel his own body as the one who he first heard moved to him, he didn’t hear his voice even as he saw his mouth move and the muscles in his face twitch in fake sympathy and concern.

When he did finally feel, it was to the burning in his knuckles and the icy chill of a unchangeable situation rushing through his nerves and bones. The boy was laid out on the ground, he could hear gasps behind him, the two boys he barely knew before him watched him with mouths agape and stuttered speech on their tongues.

Behind him, he heard a demand to know what was happening.

He felt, he was so sure he had—

\--

He woke to stars above him and a stiffness that made him feel as if each part of his body would snap apart with the smallest of movements. The migraine was so consuming that he knew it was there, somewhere, but it was like his brain couldn’t register it at the time.

It took him once, then another try to lift himself from the sand. It encrusted his hair and the back of his body where his weight had pushed and held it in, but it barely registered as he saw the shack barely a couple hundred feet away. 

With his shoulders burning and a shiver from the cold desert, Keith moved back to where he knew it would be safer to let his mind wander.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is in no way me bashing Hunk or Lance, it's simple of of those moments where you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sometimes memories are the worst and don't allow you to recall everything. Especially when you get heat-sick/stroke and pass out like an idiot. It's a good thing our boy is part alien, you know.


	4. Scouting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> :D I love good angst, is it obvious? Thank you for reading, please feel free to comment! I always like feedback!

Day 4: Scouting

But no flame burns forever, oh no  
You and I both know this all too well  
And most don’t even last the night  
No they don’t, they say they don’t  
(Tompkins Square Park- Mumford & Sons)

The shack was holy ground to his father during the years he had grown up with him around. Keith never really asked, but he saw it in how his father would venture in when he thought Keith wasn’t looking. He saw it in the tired glaze that saturated into him every evening, in every morning when Keith knew he’d spent his entire night behind those doors. He didn’t ask, though. Didn’t think that it held any worth that his father would bother to explain. It was like his mother, like the stories that his father tied down to his tongue and refused to let go.

Returning to the shack wore away some of that sanctification. Made the worn wood and the dented metal of the roof seem like a normal home instead of the rooms that he had always placed on a pedestal. 

He didn’t invade it right away, though. The desert itself had been so consuming, so encompassing at first that the shack was so small in comparison. A hint of warmth in the face of an ever churning firestorm. It took him more than half a year to follow steps that his father undoubtable took.

It started with a small box tucked beneath the couch, half of the bottom edge dented and frayed from all the times feet must have caught on it. It was one of those occasions, where Keith almost took his head off its shoulders as he tumbled across the shack’s main room. The only reason he even grabbed at the box was to throw away, to make it regret ever trying to kill him when all he’d ever done to it was walk by.

It was how one side of it seemed to weigh more than the other that caught his attention, then the sound of metal on metal when he shifted it back and forth in his hands. It was filled with statistics and graphs, readings compiled for years. 

Some were halfway filled, never completed. Keith didn’t bother to look at the dates on those ones.

What caught his eyes though, wedged in the bottom and wrapped in oil-cloth, was a sleek hilt of a knife that Keith could just make out from beneath everything else. 

The knife was more fluid and sturdy than he’d ever seen, seemingly grafted from one piece instead of the blade being embedded in a handle like he was used to. He couldn’t make sense of the marking at the base, but it held his gaze anyway, and it took him more than a moment to realize that he had not stopped staring at it since pulling it from the box.

He moved to pick up the oil-cloth that once covered the sharp edges when a piece of paper fell from it. Curiosity had always been a trait he had appreciated in himself, but as his eyes travelled down the yellowed sheet, he wished it was not so strong in this moment.

From his mother, a warning to always keep the sigil covered.

A scribble along the bottom edges, a note to give it to him on his fourteenth birthday. Not his thirteenth, or when he turned eighteen. It was a weird sentiment that was so like his father that it made his chest ache, made each breath feel like it separated his ribs from each other as far as they could go before snapping.

He’d been thirteen when the fire happened, sixteen when he found himself in the Garrison uniform. Nineteen now with a blade and an explanation that should have been his five years ago. 

Almost twenty, and he was sure that he would only gain more fragments and more pieces that couldn’t be put together. Nothing whole for the first twenty years of his life. 

He didn’t touch the box again for almost a month.

When he did, it was like a fever. A desire to reach through the numbers and notes to find whatever remained of what was lost and unfound. It led him on searches and hikes through the high desert, on paths that set him dangerously close to loose rock cliffs and ravines painstakingly carved from runoff and left over sediment.

His mind didn’t wander as much as his feet did, but as he worked it felt like the voices he used to know were there as well. Advising him, reminding him to stay alive even as his focus on the graphs and their meanings grew.

He was nearing a breakpoint, something he could feel beneath each inch of his skin, when one voice rang the clearest. Shiro’s mentor, someone who even advised Keith despite not having much to do with his time at the Garrison. Same Holt had carried the title of a father, one like Keith’s own, and he wondered what similarities that shared every time he found himself near the other. It was the same with Matt, and Keith couldn’t help but try and find parallels between himself and the Holts. He never met his wife or his daughter, and sometimes Keith wondered if that was for the best, if it would have only given him a taste of what could have been.

Keith was at a cavern’s mouth when the first echoes started, a conversation only weeks before the mission’s’ start date.

He had asked, quietly, “Don’t you ever worry about leaving, what it’d do to those left behind?”

Shiro looked up from nearby, eyebrows creased as he studied Keith’s face. Sam only smiled, sorting through the papers on his desk before setting them aside to respond.

“They know I’ll always come back.”

Those words followed Keith’s footsteps as he traveled farther down. Each syllable sounding with the noise of boots against breccia and limestone. It echoed in his mind as his eyes caught the etchings of cave art and glyphs.

“How would they know that, anything could happen?”

The marks ended in a large basin of a room, the walls smoothed from the passage of time and from what must have been whoever had made the markings to begin with. Keith simply stood there, arms shaking and eyes flickering to every detail he could find like it would make sense of this dead end.

“They know I love them, that they’re the only ones I’ll consistently think of. Even with the awe of being at the edge of our solar system.”

Matt had joined in then, talking about needing to be there to make sure his sister survived middle school. Shiro had joined in, a laugh as he reminded Keith he had things to return to as well. 

They had settled it with a promise to let Keith see the launch site himself, to let him assess the ship as much as he desired.

Now, Keith could only let himself fall back until he crouched amongst the cave’s floor, his breath stuttering and coming in small puffs as he tried to center himself. The markings above his head only rested there, it almost felt like being watched, and for the first time in months he allowed the stuttering to escape into full gasps and sobs. His body shook with it, and his ears rang with the last words Sam had spoken that day.

“They know nothing will stop me from returning.”

Even with the graphs along the wall, even with his own notes next to them, he didn’t look at them again after. They’d gained their own hallowed energy, and Keith knew he had no place to touch them again.


	5. Rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for being late, I will be updating the next two very soon. This is also a lot shorter than the others, and it'll probably stay that way. July classes kick names, take ass.

Day 5: Rest

Sheltered, you better keep the wolf back from the door  
He wanders ever closer every night  
And how he waits, baying for blood  
I promised you everything would be fine  
(The Wolf- Mumford and Sons)

The nights in the desert gave a wild energy to whatever resided beneath the moon. It waxed and waned, of course, following the changes and temperament of its mistress. 

Keith felt like he was more susceptible than most, even the new moon stirred a need in him that left so many of his nights dreamless and hollow. Full moons were worse, though. Full moons blared through the blinders in the shack, it flooded his face until not even his closed eyes could ignore the brightness of it. 

It was sleepless nights like this that eventually found him lying on the porch, his arm used as a poor excuse for a pillow, and his eyes staring upwards at the glowing surface of what haunted him. He had dreamt, once, that he’d be able to go closer to it. Maybe even walk upon its face before going and doing the same to each piece of celestial body that awaited him.

He would look down on earth instead, he would study it and wonder what was where and who was there, and it would have been amazing.

The last few months at the Garrison, before Kerberos, he had imagined Shiro there as well. He’d imagined Sam and Matt, Katie and her mother who he still hadn’t met. 

Damnit, he even imagined others. The classmates he wished to forget, the professors he wanted to hate but could only appreciate now that the desert had seeped the fury away.

He wondered if his father and mother would have been part of it, too. 

It was nights like these that he wondered too much.

Sometimes, simply sitting below the stars and watching was enough to ease the pull of the moonlight. Counting them like his father taught him blurred them together until he found himself submerged and floating amongst them, one of them in every way that truly counted. 

Their light wasn’t the same, it could never equate to the pull the moon had over him, but for now it was enough.


	6. Horizon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not exactly a bright horizon, but eh. I am mass updating, don't forget chapter 5 if you missed it!

Day 6: Horizon

Oh say something, say something  
Something like you love me  
Less you want to move away  
From the noise of this place  
(Believe- Mumford & Sons)

The waiting room was wired with a stifling heat, one that even Keith had to dig into himself to find tolerance for. He’d been pulled from classes so abruptly, barely half a clock’s worth before Iverson’s aide had motioned for Montgomery to step aside so she could whisper into her ear.

Whispering joined from behind him, students who thought they were quiet enough to not be heard, but the furrowed brow shifting into surprise and worry on Montgomery’s face made each noise sound as if they were porcelain and glass crashing and shattering. It grew louder when he was called to leave, louder even after the door closed and only his and the aide’s footsteps echoed. 

It resounded into overwhelming silence as he found himself seated with Iverson staring back at him, his eyes so tired as if the effort of simply being there was too much. Maybe it was, but the only thing Keith cared about was how it reached for him as well, ready to cling on him and hold him down until he would no longer be able to stay awake.

Iverson sighed, his hands half-lifting towards his face before stopping, “Kogane, there is a concern that needs to be addressed now.” Another gesture, and this time he did not stop himself from pushing against his temple.

“When you first came here, we had been doubtful. Your previous track record was concerning, but so were your grades. We’d never accepted something below a B before.”

Keith knew this, he remembered Shiro consoling him. He had told him it wouldn’t matter, that he should just enjoy the sunset before he took him back to the Home. He’d been so afraid that it would end at the doorstep there, that Shiro only spoke fanciful words and dreams. He’d seen people like that before, found himself face to face with their sweetened tongues and words. 

He acted like it wasn’t a surprise when Shiro was back a week later, documents in hand and a professor behind him along with a HR representative.

Iverson continued talking, pushing Keith from his thoughts.

“He was barely in his 20’s, not even a full officer yet. Santos was convinced it wouldn’t work,” a huffed laugh, “Shirogane always did like to prove us wrong.”

Keith froze with that, it had sounded so normal, but the frown Iverson continued to have was mismatched. It corroded what he just said, it drove nails into Keith’s skin.

Iverson straightened up then, “It has been officiated that the Kerberos mission has failed, contact was lost at 0415 hours yesterday morning. From the last intel that reached our satellites, it has been deemed pilot error.”

Iverson didn’t look him in the eye.

Keith hated that.

“You- you just said he always proved you wrong!” It came out before his mind registered it, so shrill that it felt unreal to his ears.

Iverson still refused to look, “And he did. We thought he was prepared for a mission this crucial.”

Both he and Iverson jolted as Keith’s hands collided with the desk between them, his chair skidding back before its side struck the ground.

“You know! You, You know he would never!” It felt for a moment like he had bitten through his tongue or cheek, the taste of iron spreading as his face burned and his mind felt dazed and so hypervigilant all at once.

“Kogane, you will—”

“How could you even assume it, how could you blame him—”

“Calm down immediately, or—”

“when you know he’d never—”

“you’ll be faced with disciplinary correction!”

Keith froze at that, eyes wide and nose flared as the heat spread further and further until it encompassed him like it did the desert and the shack and everything that had once let him down that he had tried so hard to forget and let go.

Iverson took the silence as an agreement, he began to speak again.

A moment, and Keith found himself with shoulder and arm muscles screaming in sudden jolting pain, with knuckles that felt split and heavy. His body trembled and stumbled as he moved backwards from Iverson. From the blood that dripped from the hand Iverson used to cover his eye.

The trembling didn’t stop him from careening down the hallway, shouts from behind him chasing him and he knew he would not be able to escape this. The shouts lessened before becoming nothing, and Keith realized that he didn’t even want to. He didn’t want to let this go.

He couldn’t.


	7. Free Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> finished!I did just do a mass update, so if you haven't read 5 or 6, please don't miss them!

Day 7: Free-Day

And you saw me low  
Alone again  
Didn’t they say that only love  
Will win in the end  
(Only Love- Mumford & Sons)

He found Keith on the floor of the small room that housed three boys. Keith didn’t look up to him at first, pretending to be too busy with stuffing his handful of possessions into a black garbage bag. Shiro kept the silence, only watching like he’d been expecting him to own a suitcase or something. Part of Keith wanted to laugh that he really thought an orphan would ever have something so unnecessary like that. 

Part of him wanted to cry that someone was even put off that he had a half-filled bag with distorted and ripping edges to his name.

He didn’t protest when Shiro carried it for him, but he didn’t let the other leave his gaze. Even as they stepped out into the fading heat of the summer’s night, Keith felt the chilling realization that maybe, even after moving his things out and cleaning his small corner of his room for the net boy, that maybe it would still be nothing more than a transient absence. 

How could this person, barely half a decade older than him, find a way to reach into the system and rewrite what Keith thought was permanent and final. 

How could he, how could he even dare.

He wondered when Shirogane would realize some things were better left unchanged and forgotten.

\--

He hated the simulations, hated how compressed and artificial it was. Each jolt and twist and dip of the machinery reminded him how everything in the world carried a false twin. Something people assumed was the real thing, only to be disappointed.

Shirogane, because of course it would be him, took one glance at the month long list of failing grades and subpar reviews, and dragged Keith from the mess hall with the promise of real sandwich meat and enough bread to make an armada of food. 

Keith was honestly easy to please when someone realized what he valued.

Keith hated that Shirogane knew that.

It was his third sandwich, his teeth sawing through hoagie buns and leaving a carnage trail of crumbs behind, when Shirogane decided to not leave the issue alone.

“So, anything you like about the pilot simulations?”

Keith purposefully didn’t answer, letting a new bite take away any chance to answer.

Shiro persisted, and Keith tried not to choke.

“They are required, you know? Sometimes they’d hard to get used to, but it really does help later on.”

Another bite, he swore he saw an eyebrow twitch. Crumbs fell to join the fallen when he failed to hide his grin.

“Keith, I’m serious.”

The grin fell then, and after a moment he failed to refill his mouth. Shiro waited, and Keith knew Shiro sensed that Keith was trying to outwait him. Shiro knew, and Keith knew that he knew this, that Shiro could outwait him ten times over and still have more patience than the entire officer staff combined.

Keith decided he didn’t want to lose something that was predestined to be lost.

“My dad used to take me riding, I told you that. Well, he told me nothing compared to the real thing.”

Shiro only nodded, and from the corner of his eye Keith knew Shiro kept his gaze away. That he let Keith feel like it was only him talking.

He jumped on that, relaxing even as the bread melded around and between his fingers. He ignored the slimy chill of the mustard and mayonnaise.

“I’m tired of fake things, Shiro. I’m tired of being told I need them first before I can finally have the real thing.”

Shiro was quiet, he stayed quiet even after Keith stopped talking, as if waiting for any last part that wanted to drip from Keith’s mouth and into the air around them.

It took a while, but Shiro responded after Keith unwrapped the unfinished food from his hands and set it down on the paper plate before him.

“You probably won’t like that I’m going to tell you, that you need this fake thing. But Keith, I think that having all these things that failed you. It makes you see things in patterns.”

Shiro turned then, moving his hips and legs until he directly faced Keith.

“Those patterns, they were memorized to keep you safe before. You needed them, and this sounds horrible, but I’m glad you had them. They brought you this far. But sometimes, they keep you from what you can have.”

Shiro didn’t talk again for a while, though he didn’t try to turn away, but as they cleaned up and began to leave he paused in front of the door way before Keith.

“You know I don’t make promises I won’t keep, Keith. You pass this class, hell, if you beat my scores even, I will make sure you get a full week of desert riding when you hit eighteen.”

Keith found that he had grown to like Shiro’s promises, he found that he grew to expect them to actually happen.

\--

He kept the promise of desert drifting and riding.

He kept the promise of going to the launch site with him and the Holts.

He kept in contact every second Tuesday of the month, for almost nine of them. Almost half of the entire mission.

Keith sometimes still waited for his last one, sometimes he would trick himself in to thinking that he still wore that uniform. That he was on his fourth sandwich and that he was still claiming bragging rights for having the top score once more.

He painted the image of the ship landing over the hill’s rise, in the direction of the Garrison’s launching building and the fenced off concrete covered mass of acres.

He imagined the gleams of silver he saw during storms, during sunsets on the clouds, during night when the lights on his bikes flashed against street signs, that they were the laughing gleam Shiro used to have.

He imagined, on the bad nights, if that was frozen now, immortalized in space. He wondered of the remains were too badly disfigured to even tell who they once belonged to.

He wondered, if he spent so long hoping for a promise to be fulfilled that it was now like the false things he used to identify and avoid so well.

\--

One night, another in the collection of sleepless and restless late nights and early mornings he possessed, he caught a glimmer in the sky.

It was easy to think it a figment, to pay no mind.

The glimmer morphed into a splinter, quickly then into a bright flash, and then a flash that turned night into day for only a brief moment.

The crash could be felt even were Keith stood in front of the shack, and with wide eyes he darted back inside, reaching for his jacket, reaching for the boxes that his father stored along the back wall inside.

Keith wondered about promises, then. He wondered if something that could be false may eventually change into a big enough sliver of truth.

He found that yes, it could.


End file.
